Pfizer to pay $55M to clean Wyeth's dirty laundry

Another marketing settlement has been wrung out of a Big Pharma player, with Pfizer ($PFE) this time paying $55 million and change to clear up a problem it acquired. The agreement with federal authorities is over the way Wyeth pushed acid reflux drug Protonix for unapproved uses and relied on unproven claims, Reuters reported. The problems ran between February 2000 and June 2001, way before Pfizer picked up Wyeth for $68 billion in 2009. This is just one of a number of large settlements with the feds this year, including the $3 billion record-breaker that GlaxoSmithKline ($GSK) agreed to for all kinds of bad behavior. Story | Special Report